The present invention relates to a phonetic reader for reading out a correspondence text transmitted through an electronic network (hereafter called E-mail).
A text-speech converter for reading out an input text data phonetically by voice synthesizing is reported in "Japanese Text-to-Speech Software for Personal Computers" by Iwata et al., 2-8-13, pp. 245-246 of the Proceedings of Autumn Meeting 1993, Acoustic Society of Japan, and an application of text-speech converter for the E-mail system is disclosed in a Japanese patent application entitled "Electronic Mail System", laid open as a Provisional Publication No. 289854/'91, wherein a special character code is inserted in E-mail text to make a pause for waiting a response from the listener, which is replaced with the inserted special character code in its reply mail.
According to the development of global computer network as the Internet, application of the text-speech converter to the E-mail system is expected as practical communication media, especially between people having visual inconvenience and other people.
However, as the E-mail correspondence has been developed on visual media such as computer display or printed lists, there are spread some special conventions, one of which is a quotation code such as `&gt;` or `.vertline.` added to each line head of paragraphs quoted from other text. These quotation codes make conventional text-speech converters easily misunderstand the E-mail texts. Especially in languages where no space is inserted between words and so no word lapping is performed, such as Japanese or Chinese texts, the quotation code may separate a word into two parts.
FIG. 9 illustrates an example of a Japanese text transmitted by the E-mail system, wherein the first (saying "Tomorrow from 10 o'clock, the me-") and the second ("eting will be held.") lines are quotation from other E-mail text, and the third line is the reply from the sender (saying "I will present."). Hereafter, in the specification, each of the quoted lines is called a quotation line, parts of quotation lines originally continued are called a quotation section, and a paragraph consisting of quotation lines is called a quotation paragraph, while other paragraphs being called communication paragraphs consisting of communication lines including communication sections.
In the example of FIG. 9, a word ""
(meeting) from end of the first line to top of the second line is separated by the quotation code `&gt;` into ``
and ``,
and therefore the conventional text-speech converter can not recognize the word "",
resulting in a mis-read.
Further, texts are read out by a mono-tone in the conventional text-speech converter irrespectively of difference between the quotation paragraphs and the communication paragraphs. So, there are certain practical problems of difficulty for grasping the contents at once or contrarily troublesomeness to be forced to hear well-known texts again.
Still further, E-mail texts are generally added with header information used for delivering in the network, not necessary to be read out in many cases. For omitting the header information, some listener's intervention is required for excluding the header information from texts to be read out in the conventional text-speech converter.